Also, check out Krita; it looks a lot like photoshop to me, but the last time I used photoshop was 7 years ago. https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-dBDHsjsOG4w/U1e8ubOrBTI/A...

There is a guy, David Revoy, that uses only free software to do it's job, and it seems successful at it. http://davidrevoy.com/

Ehh...depends what you're doing.

99% of the time, I just need to crop an image to a certain size. GIMP is actually much better than photoshop for this particular exact task. Nice UI for resizing the selection box in place. Other simple tweaks - brightness/contrast etc - are handled perfectly competently.

It certainly isn't a drop-in replacement for the sort of magic 'proper' photoshoppers do. But for a semi-competent web-monkey like me, it suffices perfectly well on those occasions when imagemagick is too blunt an instrument.

Vector to bitmap conversion sucks, though. Seriously, if IM can do this without pixellating everything to buggery, why not GIMP?

Well, you can change that in a way. Just use the money you would otherwise pay Adobe and fund the feature you need. You can easily contact the developers, there's a list of them here https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/tree/AUTHORS ; By browsing the source code, you can also find their emails.

Pixelmator is a much better solution if you're on a Mac. Not free though...